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I was thinking about this at work the other day and like. what if the reason Hastings is so in-the-moment to the exclusion of all other moments stems from his service during the War?
Don't think about the past. Go too far and you're confronted with the horrors of the trenches. Shells screaming overhead, no way of knowing where they'll land. The sound of explosions ringing so loud in your ears that you don't know if you'll ever hear anything else again. Great, metal beasts crushing everything in their path. Boys torn apart before they had the chance to come of age.
Go back even further and you have to face the man you once were. The man you can never be again. The man you could have been but can never become after living through what you did.
And as for the future, it simply doesn't exist on the battlefield. It's become a vague, nebulous, abstract concept that may or may not come to pass, so why give it too much thought? The here and now is all that matters. It's the only thing you're guaranteed.